Pool 2.0 MID-Talk Highlights Opportunity.

What a pleasure it is to be able to talk about MIDs to people that are open to new techniques and new tools. What a great learning experience it was and what a boost to my confidence about the MID and ultra mobile PC markets when 99% of people didn’t even know that these devices are starting to hit the market. It proves that that theres a good marketing opportunity out there and when you hear comments like ‘can I buy one from you’ and ‘I so need one of these’ (that was a ‘need’, not a ‘want’ there!) you know there’s at least a seed here with some of the most mobile Internet users on the planet.
Just like the Microbloggers of MBC09, these people NEED the internet in a quality, consistent way, wherever they are. 3G is expensive here in the US but when your business depends on it, $60 per month is nothing when coupled to a fully mobile PC that lets you take your desktop processes with you.

We demonstrated the UMID, the Fujitsu and the Viliv S5 and explained the differences between the form-factors and how each device was aimed at a different target customer. We talked about commonality and how you can bundle these devices together it terms of marketing. Is it good that each device is different or does it mean that marketing it becomes very expensive? We talked about price points and clearly, a fast, high quality mobile computing experience is worth well over $1000 to most people at SXSW. We talked about keyboards and we talked more about keyboards. The thumbing style had to be highlighted to a few that saw the ‘mini netbook’ form factor and dived straight in with a table-top 10-finger approach. There is no doubt that there’s a psychological connection between a desktop operating system and a keyboard for 99% of people and if the keyboard is missing, people don’t want to know. Of course this is something we’ve known for years but its always nice to have it confirmed!

I also had the pleasure to talk to people that had tested out various ultra mobile device and to talk about the iPhone phenomenon. Interestingly, not a single person ‘challenged’ the MIDs by comparing the capabilities of the iPhone. Most of the people here are pushing the iPhone way beyond its capability (just check out the number of people sitting next to power points charging iphones!) and are ready for the next step in pocketable computing power. Most are happy to take a secondary device to achieve this too.

The proffesional and passionate crowd at SXSW represent a small proportion of the buying public but its a very important one, The people here are not only in the business and therefore happy to look at anything that saves them time but they’re also active web users outside that sphere. Moblogging, microblogging and tweeting is part of their lives already and it’s an indicator for the future of messaging for the mass market. They are also very influential and when you put all those qualities together you end up with one of the most important seeding points that ive ever seen for mobile computing devices. There are no hardware vendors here but its clear that if someone presented a high quality, branded device similar to the MBook, they might just hit that spot and end up with the best marketing opportunity that mobile computing has ever had.